ECE News Story

Clark School Welcomes New Faculty

Elaine Oran joins the Department of Aerospace Engineering as a Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering. Oran's research includes work on chemically reactive flows, turbulence, numerical analysis, high-performance computing and parallel architectures, shocks and shock interactions, rarefied gases, and microfluidics, with applications to combustion, propulsion, astrophysical explosions, and micro-sensor design. Oran comes to the university from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, where she was the Senior Scientist for Reactive Flow Physics, and is now an Emeritus Scientist. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Michigan and a Visiting Professor at Leeds University. She has the distinction of being both an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow and an AIAA Honorary Fellow. She is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor to which any aerospace engineer can aspire, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. She received her A.B. in Chemistry and Physics from Bryn Mawr College and both her M.Ph. in Physics and Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University.

Stuart Laurence joins the Department of Aerospace Engineering as an assistant professor. Laurence comes to the university from the German Aerospace Center in Goettingen where he worked in the Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology since 2009. His research focuses on hypersonic aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics, supersonic combustion and propulsion, boundary-layer transition, naturally occurring hypersonic flows, and the development of experimental techniques. Laurence received both his M.S. (2002) and Ph.D. (2006) in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology, where he also completed his postdoctoral work. He received his B.Sc. (Hons)/B.A. (2001) in Applied Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Steven Jay joins the Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE) as an assistant professor. Jay, who earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 2009, specializes in vascular biology and bioengineering, tissue and protein engineering, and therapeutic vascularization, all with an emphasis on clinical translation. He will direct the Vascular Pharmacoengineering and Biotherapeutics Laboratory, which will focus on developing novel drug delivery systems, enhancing tissue engineering techniques, and understanding the quantitative biology of interactions between drug carriers and cells. Prior to joining the University of Maryland and the Clark School, Jay was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass., where he designed new proteins to promote diabetic wound healing.

Dana Dachman-Soled joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor. She is also affiliated with the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, she earned her Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University and spent two years as a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. Her work focuses on cryptography and security, and she is interested in computational learning theory and property of Boolean functions.

Tudor Dumitras joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He most recently worked at Symantec Research, where he built the Worldwide Intelligence Network Environment, a program with big data techniques. His research focus is big data approaches to problems in system security and dependability.

Charalampos "Babis" Papamanthou joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor and is also affiliated with UMIACS and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University. He joins ECE from the University of California Berkeley, where he was a postdoctoral researcher working on applied cryptography and computer security. His research will continue to explore problems in those areas.

Marina Leite joins the Department of Materials Science Engineering as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP). She received her Ph.D. in physics from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, and has conducted postdoctoral research at Caltech and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She has had prior appointments at Caltech, the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Source, Eindhoven University of Technology, and the Max-Planck Institute. Leite has a diverse background that spans physics, optics, materials science, and chemistry, and her research concerns novel materials and devices for photovoltaic applications.

Yifei Mo joins the Department of Materials Science Engineering as an assistant professor. Mo, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010, is a computational materials scientist. At the Clark School, Mo plans to apply his techniques to the study and development of new high-performance materials for batteries and energy applications.

Peter Chung joins the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an associate professor. Chung comes to the university from the Army Research Lab where he has worked since 2000, and most recently he was a Mechanical Engineer Team Leader (since 2003) for Interdisciplinary Computational Sciences and Engineering. His research involves studying the effect of modeling randomness and aperiodicity in complex microstructures, the role of mechanical stresses on optical phonon transport, and the structure-property relationships of lattice defects in noncubic crystalline solids. Chung received both his Ph.D. (1999) and M.S. (1996) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and his B.S. (1994) in Aerospace Engineering (with high honors) from the University of Virginia.

Jelena Srebric joins the Department of Mechanical Engineering as a professor. Srebric comes to the university from the University of Pennsylvania where she has been a professor of architectural engineering since 2000 and an adjunct professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering since 2007. She has also been a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health since 2008. Her work focuses on enabling multi-scale modeling of built infrastructure and providing a reliable assessment of how these systems affect occupant population and energy consumption. Srebric received her Ph.D. (2000) in Building Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and both her M.S. (1997) and B.S. (1994) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Belgrade.